THE NEW 52—Is the Fat Lady singing?

Two high profile stories ran on Bleeding Cool yesterday, that laid out certain woes at DC Comics.

When DC Comics chose to wipe the slate clean and start over back in 2011, canceling all their titles and erasing their established continuity, relaunching all the books as first issues and creating an all new, all different universe in order to woo new readers, it looked like a huge success. Sales went up—way up—and for the first time in, oh, EVER DC began to outsell Marvel. It does appear now, with five years perspective, this temporary bump in sales is attributable to the novelty effect. Or the train-wreck effect, depending on who you ask. DC’s current sales figures, though, provide undeniable proof; the New 52 has been a failure. Sales are lower now than they were before DC rebooted.

In spite of the fact that some excellent stories have come out of the New 52—Scott Snyder’s run on the Batman books, or the initial Justice League reintroduction, before the writers lost their way with all that multiverse, alternate dimensional crap; and I was overjoyed to see Swamp Thing revamped and brought back into the DC mainline—fan reaction to the New 52, which ain’t so new anymore, has overall ranged from lukewarm to hostile. Sales are reflecting that. Might we see a return to the pre-New 52 DC universe in the days to come?